"Moscow. It's another world!" A sign bearing that message, in English, is the first thing to greet visitors as they step off the plane at Sheremetyevo-2. It refers to the airport's duty-free shops, but it may as well refer to the rest of the city. I had the fortunate opportunity to visit Hannah while she was on her assignment in Moscow, and she has invited me to write my impressions. She's been writing of sightseeing and working, so I decided to write about my culture shock.That sign is the first thing to greet visitors; it is not, however, the first thing a visitor sees on arrival. That distinction would have to go to the State Officer for Giving Permission to the Jetway Operator to Open the Aircraft Door. (O.K., I made that title up.) After landing, our Lufthansa pilot informed us that our entry into Russia would be delayed as this officer was not present at our arrival gate, and the door could not possibly be opened until official permission had been given. This was in spite of the facts that all of us on the plane had been issued visas which were checked by the gate staff at the Frankfurt Main airport, and we would soon enough have to present ourselves for passport and customs inspection at Sheremetyevo. Nevertheless, for the fully trained jetway operator to open the door without the approval of the state would have been an unpardonable lapse in security, surely resulting in a one-way trip to Gulag City. After giving the official "Da" required for the door to be opened, the officer stood by the door as we passengers filed past. She provided each of us with a working definition of "dour" as we passed, and pointedly failed to smile or in any other way welcome us.
Once one has successfully navigated one's way out of the airport, I believe it is possible to get by in any country knowing only six key words in the local language. In Russian, those words are: da [yes], nyet [no], pozhalsta [please], spasiba [thank you], piva [beer] and tualet [toilet]. These words, in combination with hand signals, are generally sufficient to meet life's daily needs.
The trick in Russian, though, is that they use a different alphabet. Just as the railroad operates on a different gauge to forestall invaders, I began to suspect that Saint Cyril's clever and devious manipulations of otherwise familiar letters were meant solely to confuse foreigners. In Russian, the letter "P" is read as an "R." "B" is "V," "C" is "S," "H" is "N." The "L" we know and love is replaced with a Л. "G" is Г, "P" is П, "F" is Ф. It gets worse. There are also letters that look like "3" and "4" (э and ч), and weird mathematical symbols (ж and ю, among others). Sentences begin to resemble physics equations. It goes on: a backward "N" is an "I," while a backward "R" is pronounced "ya." Reading Russian begins to resemble code-breaking, as each letter has seemingly been assigned a new value.
Once the substitution scheme has been learned, it becomes easier to decipher Russian words. "Ресторан" for instance, becomes, phonetically, "res-to-ran," or restaurant. A street sign reading стоп is clearly a "stop" sign, and the yellow cars labeled "такси" are taxis. "интернет каФе" is "Internet Cafe." Just when one begins to get comfortable, though, in sneak the lower-case letters. We might expect a lower case Russian "T" to be a "t," but of course it isn't. It's an "m." Thusly, a "Ресторан" and a "ресmоран" are both restaurants. An added wrinkle: that could be "ресmopaнь," the final "ь" being some vestigial appendage analogous to "e" in the "Ye Olde" version of English. Even though some of the words sound familiar, the only way to recognize them when reading is to sound them out. It was following this procedure at the Central Museum of the Armed Forces of the U.S.S.R. (they haven't gotten around to changing the sign yet) that I found myself reading German written in Cyrillic.
All of this linguistic transliteration becomes important in places like the subway. Recognizing that what your guide book calls Novoslobodskaya and what the sign on the wall says is новослоBодская are the same place is crucial. Paying attention to the signs on the subway can lead one into other kinds of trouble, however. If you're concentrating on the signs when the doors open, you could find yourself shoved through them whether or not the train has stopped. The Moscow subway is allegedly the busiest in the world, and that's not hard to believe. I was never on a car that wasn't full, and trains come into each of the more than 150 stations at about two minute intervals. Each station is also a mini-museum of Soviet art, as they were set up to provide emergency fallout shelter in the event of a nuclear war. What better way to ride out a nuclear winter with morale intact than to spend it staring at statues, mosaics and other artwork depicting the heroic struggles of the proletariat?The monetary system also presents some difficulties, but not because of any difficulty in understanding it. The Russian rouble has fallen on hard times, and as a result, so have the Russian people. One rouble is now worth about 3.5 cents US, down from a pre-devaluation high of 15.9 cents less than three years ago. Rouble coins come in denominations of five, two and one, and one rouble is divided into 100 kopeks. For some reason, coins of 50, 10 and one kopek are in circulation. Certainly, a 1 kopek coin (value: 0.035 US cents - that's right, 35 thousandths of a cent) must cost far more than its value to mint. My favorite souvenirs to collect while traveling are samples of the local currency; the only way I acquired one- and ten-kopek coins was to pick them up off the ground where they had been discarded as useless. How the people who had them on hand to chuck out got them I can't guess.*
One very effective way to save money in Russia is to only carry large bills. They cannot be spent. By large, I mean 100 rouble notes. No one can make change, so there are two potential outcomes. I tried to purchase a 6 rouble postcard from three different vendors inside G.U.M. using a 100 rouble note, and was turned away each time. Evidently "no change" is a well practiced English phrase among Moscow shopkeepers. Two of them didn't even bother to look up from their reading to dismiss me. They caught the 100 rouble note out of the corners of their eyes and knew not to bother.
The other possible outcome is somewhat friendlier. At the Moscow State Museum of Architecture, where the admission fee is 15 roubles, I presented my unchangeable 100 rouble note (mind you, this thing is only worth $3.46 US) to the attendant, who, of course, did not have change. I was therefore permitted to enter the museum for free. I initially felt some guilt at being a (relatively) rich westerner taking advantage of the kindly ladies who ran the place and resolved to return to pay my fee once I had the proper change. (Then I went in and reviewed both galleries and decided that at $0.52 US the place was a rip-off. Gallery #1 has about two dozen photos of the war in Chechnya. What this has to do with architecture, other than blowing it up, remains unexplained. Gallery #2 had some early 19th century French engravings of views of Moscow, but I would later discover prints of the same engravings on sale in the gift shop of the Hotel Russia just off Red Square. There was no Gallery #3.)
Perhaps the thing that struck me most about Moscow was the preponderance of Soviet era decor. I remembered seeing broadcasts about ten years ago of jubilant mobs toppling statue after statue of communist icons, and I remember reading that all of these statues had been carted off to a makeshift junkyard to have their bronze recycled (probably into kopek coins). The junkyard is now a "sculpture park," and these monuments have been stood back up for display. No jumble of sledge-hammered statuary here: "Iron" Felix Dzerzhinsky, grandfather of the KGB, strikes the same heroic pose here as he did for all those years in front of Lubyanka Prison. Elsewhere around the city, the Soviet star still tops the towers in the Kremlin walls, hammers and sickles abound as a decorative motif, and statues and paintings of Lenin are inescapable. You can't swing a dead dissident without hitting several likenesses of him. Also, most apartment blocks have granite or marble plaques embedded in their walls detailing the "heroic accomplishments in the name of state communism" that were perpetrated, er, accomplished by former (and maybe current?) occupants, including Ho Chi Minh among others. I had expected that these sorts of reminders of the Soviet system would have been the first thing to go after the reforms of a decade ago, but now I realize that if they took away everything that carried such reminders there would be nothing left. All the statues and all the paintings would have to go, all of the buildings would have to be renamed - it's far too pervasive.I made it a point to visit Lenin's mausoleum. I happened to be there on a day with few visitors, so I had a private audience with him. (Well, semi-private; it was me, Lenin and the guard.) Considering he's been dead for three quarters of a century he looks remarkably intact. After Lenin's chamber, the tomb empties into a garden by the Kremlin wall where various heroes of the state have been interred. I had paused in front of Stalin's grave when I was nudged by the older gentleman next to me. I didn't understand his words, but from the grin, the hand gestures and the conspiratorial tone in his voice I gather he said something like "I'm sure glad he's down there and not still on the other side this wall." I got the distinct impression that he remembered Stalin well, and now simply relished the fact that he could say such things over his grave. So maybe the old monuments will go.
After visiting Lenin I headed off to one of the many monuments to the end of the Cold War that dot the city. They're not listed as such in the guide book, but they're easy to find - just look for the red and yellow signs that read "макдоналдс."
*I can help resolve this mystery, partially. Prices in stores are generally given as XX roubles and YY kopeks, where YY virtually always is zero. However, for items sold by weight, even if the unit price is in roubles, the weight of the product may cause a non-zero number of kopeks to end up in the price. Thus I bought an orange one day costing some number of roubles and 26 kopeks, which of course I did not have, nor did the cashier have change down to the kopek. But if she had, I could have acquired some very small denomination coins. - H
